Developing A Health Advocacy Campaign For Hiv Stigma Reduction

HIV and AIDS is affecting the latino community in a negative way. It’s causing the quality of life in the United States to drop, but why is that. In 2015, Hispanics/Latinos made up about 23% of the countries new HIV diagnoses despite only being 18% of the population. The stigma that comes from the Hispanic/Latino culture, factors being economical or personal are major factors that makes HIV/AIDS thrive in the latino community. The young Hispanic/Latino community are at risk since, they are being deprived from showing their sexuality because of their cultures stigma. The gender power imbalance in these communities, and their stigma against homosexuals. Statistics from new HIV infections, gender ratios, death rates, education and so on.

Having a support system that understands the effects of HIV related stigma, giving these people knowledge about HIV related stigma as well as how heterosexual men are affected by it. According to Galvan et al., (2008) for African Americans having a support from friends and family is a way to decrease their perception of HIV related stigma, with this support they don’t feel isolated, judged, or internalizing these stigmas. Organizations that target heterosexual HIV men as a group, would also help move away from the idea that HIV is a “gay” or “drug abuser”

This deal with addressing the community, family and social networks that people are part of. Nurses should in this case analyze the different social environments that people live in so as to successfully address the AIDs pandemic. This is mainly due to the fact that people may tend to form their attitudes towards the disease depending on their social network. Nurses should form groups, and educate the people as a community, about the effects of the disease on both the community and family, an undertaking which will raise awareness among the community members. This is likely to help the community to be cautious and responsible for their actions, as well as prevent the promotion of any negative values that may increase chances of people in the society acquiring the disease (Levine & What Works Working Group, 2007). Additionally, nursing should address the issue of stigma that family and social networks have towards the AIDs pandemic and those suffering from it, and which hinder people from seeking help and knowing their status (Qubuda & Mphumela, 2009).

In today’s world we seem to put aside things that we consider no longer a threat. Well we are wrong to do this, because HIV/AIDS still affects over 5.4 million people that are walking around with this infection or full blown AIDS. They are friends, Criminals, neighbors, and even children attending school, etc. So, why do we think it is ok to not worry about a problem that does not have a cure, but only a life time of meds? Within this qualitative research method, we will explore Sexual risk, there or the Measures, Sexual risk, method, demographics, HIV/AIDS risk and may add other areas as they relate to this study.

With the help of government programs such as the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) as well as multiple other methods of sociological research and social justice work, there have been shifts toward better understanding this disease, those which are living with it, and the societal impact one’s own prejudices can make toward an individual living with AIDS. However, discrepancies still exist within how to properly educate others on the disease, how to recognize it as a disability within the context of our society, and how we must reconcile stigmas that play a role in plaguing any sort of positive conversation on the topic. With well-informed citizens on the issues of HIV and AIDS patients, not only can we reduce the stigma associated with the illness, but also work toward medical advancements that assist those living with HIV in a nondiscriminatory manner.

Twenty years ago, a person who has contracted Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, would be ostracized, labeled as a homosexual, and was likely to be banned from public places such as pools and school. The lifestyle was undesirable, and the lack of education on the subject lead many people to start and believe asinine rumors about the virus and its transmission. On top of this the carrier must also take upwards of twenty pills a day to hopefully prevent the growth of HIV, and eventually progressing into AIDS. HIV doesn’t just affect Latinos, African Americans, or gay, but every single person.

But before we discuss ways in reducing HIV stigma, we should talk about what it consists of in Baton Rouge. Stigma can become a chronic stressor that leads to poor coping skills, inadequate self-care, and risky sexual behaviors (Johnson et al. 72). According to an HIV Infrastructure Study conducted by the Southern HIV/AIDS Initiative, they discussed what the HIV stigma consisted of in Baton Rouge. After a few interviews with employees in HIV/AIDS clinics and people living with HIV/AIDS, they stated that one of the main reasons why people refuse to go to a clinic to get HIV tested or delay testing is because they are afraid that people they know might see them getting tested and assume the worst from them (Reif et al. 12). People also don’t want to get tested because they fear the repercussions of getting tested positive for HIV and that their family or loved ones might shun them away if they were HIV-positive. People should not care about who is going to see them getting tested because they are being smart about taking steps in knowing their HIV status instead of waiting to show signs of AIDS infection and then it’ll be too late to get any treatment. Moreover, one study evaluating the HIV Stigma Scale had some key observations. Out of one-hundred and ten HIV-positive African-Americans that were picked for this study, some of the appalling statements they agreed with the most

HIV is a detrimental disease in the African-American community. During the 1980s HIV was on the rise as many people were uneducated about the virus itself and how the virus was contracted. Precious contracted HIV from her mother's boyfriend, which is more difficult to handle when you live in a state of poverty. Precious had limited funds and limited health care options. If an individual contracts HIV in 2016 there are medications that can prolong their life and keep them comfortable unlike the resources available in the 1980s. According to Rao and colleagues, African-Americans face many downfalls with HIV due to difficulty accessing proper care and medication (2016). Rao address that there is a stigma associated with HIV, as well as African-Americans,

The stigma towards HIV positive African-American women also exists within their own communities; unfortunately, this stigma towards these women does not encourage them to come out as HIV positive individuals. The problem with this fear is that it not only worsens the anguish for the sick individual, but also puts the people around the individual at risk. In “Social Context of Rural Women with HIV/AIDS,” authors Kenneth D. Phillips, Linda Moneyham, Sandra P. Thomas, Mary Gunther, Medha Vyavaharkar discuss the significance of the stigma felt by HIV positive women; the authors point out that the existing stigma causes these women to live in secret (2011). In order to keep their illness hidden, they would have to be maintain some form of normalcy with the people around them. Societal stigma plays an important role in the occurrence of HIV; it can be studied by examining the results of “stigma reduction” in African-American communities (Loutfy et al, 2015). HIV stigma reduction is difficult when dealing with African-American women because the stigma of sexism and racism cannot be ignored. One of the other effects of stigma is depression (Logie, James, Tharao, & Loutfy, 2012). In a “multi-method community-based research (CBR) study with Women’s Health in Women’s Hands (WLWH) across Ontario,’’ researchers also found that other forms of stigma like race and gender do correlate with the stigma felt by HIV positive African-American women

Looking at the specific disease of HIV/AIDS, there is a captivating negative stigma surrounding anyone infected or possibly infected because others are fearful. This stigma is so potent because the disease usually starts from a homosexual and then spreads, attacking

The early days of the AIDS epidemic challenged the cartesian nature of biomedical culture. With its emphasis on empiricism, the superior biomedical mind could normally make sense of the inferior patient’s bodily concerns. In the early 80s, though, the scientific method seemed to be failing with AIDS, with no clear biological etiologic agent being identified, and rumors circulated. As the biomedical mind struggled to define and categorize AIDS, the moralistic nature of medical authority revealed itself. Instead of pathology residing in the biology of a patient, it appeared to transcend the patient’s biology and reveal deviant sexual behavior. Instead of being able to treat or study the disease, the diseased bodies were quarantined. Even when it was understood that AIDS had a viral cause, biomedicine’s quarantining practices became subtler, but still perpetuated the social stigma of AIDS patients. In this essay, I examine the nature of AIDS stigma through the lens of two biomedical professionals’ memories of the first decade of the epidemic. One such professional is Dr. M. Robert Hill, M.D. He is a retired internist of 68 years, who used to work at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in Town and Country, Missouri, and treated several AIDS patients before antiretroviral therapy was discovered. The other ethnographic source is Dr. Daniel Hanson, a current Immunology lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, who was completing his second postdoctoral fellowship in immunology at

During the late 1990s, the HIV virus spread to different parts of the world affecting millions of people and causing the death of many people. The spread of the virus brought fear to many people, especially those in America. Negative attitudes toward those with HIV or AIDS grew which made those with the virus feel ashamed of being exposed to the virus. Mary Fisher argues that raising awareness of HIV/AIDS is necessary to not only prevent the spread of the virus but to also help support those, not stigmatize those, who are HIV positive. Through this argument, Fisher encourages Republican Americans to put aside their political stances and bring awareness toward HIV/AIDS.

Exploring perspectives pertaining to health status is challenging and requires a heightened level of sensitivity and education for study researchers. While the researchers in this study did a good job of explaining the informed consent process, they lacked in explaining the photo release form in the detail needed to relay the significance of it to the overall project. Additionally, the researchers would have benefitted from having a group discussion before the start of the project about HIV/AIDS and status disclosure among program participants, to gauge their level of readiness and divide them up as such. However, this photo voice project provided participants with greater opportunities to recognize and bring to the forefront the challenges and discriminations faced daily because of their status and the stigmas associated with

Interventions for stigma reduction have been introduced in the past, but the majority of them were only based on information provision about HIV/AIDS. We now know that simply providing information is not sufficient in decreasing stigma (Harma et al.,2006). Community-based interventions and targeting human rights is necessary to get to the root of not only

There are HIV-related stigmas and discriminations that refer to the prejudice, abuse and negativity that is shown towards people living HIV and aids.in many countries with available data, over 50%of people have been said to have shown discriminatory attitude toward people living with HIV and AIDS. These stigmas have made people living with this